Dr Poo’s African Adventure
Episode x8
Kevin does a terrible stand-up routine in the restaurant. The next act is a 40ft Sicilian Gorilla, Thing Thong, who smashes up the restaurant whilst miming to Frank Sinatra records. Unfortunately he doesn’t react kindly to Dana’s mention of the mafia and he really smashes up the restaurant, killing thousands. Poo and his friends make good their escape.
KEVIN: Good evening, ladies and Hottentots. Now it’s time for the supper show at Chez Dana, the classiest restaurant in the African savannah. Which reminds me, I don’t know when I felt so good! (Crowd boos) Hey, did you hear the one about the African Sheikh who said to his tribe ‘I’ve got some good gnus and some bad gnus’? Get it? Gnus? Wildebeest? You may keep gibbon me the treatment but I’ll springbok every time! Alright, alright, OK, OK, take it easy, Kenya? I’m Ghana get out of here cos all of a Sudan I’ve got Togo so Uganda at this next act!
This episode includes a reference to Hottentots, a colonial name for the Khoikhoi, an African ethnic group. It is now considered an offensive slur, coming from the Dutch word for ‘stutterer’, referring to the click sounds in their language. Perhaps they got away with it in 1981… perhaps not, for the series was pulled around this time!
Dr Poo’s African Adventure
Episode x9
Dr Poo and Gumbootu finally remove the fire engine from Talbot’s head – along with all his hair – and Clarence drives them to the border with South Africa, where they encounter border security. Poo has to pretend they are a displaced group from the Black and White Minstrel party. At one point Gumbootu accidentally slips into the Full-Frontal Hot Thrusting Swedish Version of the episode along the way. He quickly swallows his words and reverts to the Approved for Catholics version…
Dr Poo’s African Adventure
Episode x10
This episode of Dr Poo takes place in South Africa, and is forced to comply with local Apartheid regulations. The first portion of the episode is for whites only, therefore persons of the black or colour persuasions must not listen to it; Gumbootu and the other black characters appear only in the last 5 seconds of the episode, protesting their cramped conditions. Clarence, meanwhile, has located the What-Are-You-Talking-About, We-Weren’t-Really-Nazis-During-The-War South African Finance Company, responsible for the plot to repossess the Africans’ tribal fire engines.
Dr Poo’s African Adventure
Episode x11
Listening to the black character’s complain about being squeezed down the end of the last episode, Dr Poo declares South Africa black.
GUMBOOTU: It don’t work, made, we tried it.
KEVIN: But Doctor, apart from the violence, oppression and institutionalised human misery, what have you got against South Africa?
DR POO: Well, for a start, I had to pose as a Queensland politician just to get into the country, and I’m sorry Kevin, but there are some things which even I find humiliating. And once I’d arrived in the place, those arrogant Boers forced me to have segregated episodes!
Dr Poo leads everyone up the fire engine’s extension ladder. They form a human chain, ending in Denis, who wields a tire iron. Together, they strike the finance company over the head.
Dr Poo’s African Adventure
Episode x12
Well, fans, there goes the hooter signalling full time in this exciting Dr Poo adventure. And as the players leave the field, let’s have a summing up. Doctor Livingstone?
LIVINGSTONE: Well, Kevin, it was a good, clean adventure, except for some very dirty play by the South Africans in the closing minutes.
SOUTH AFRICAN: I say, look here, fellow. We South Africans are tired of always being painted as the pig-ignorant authoritarian racists that we are. This is just a slander, put about by black trash who don’t know their place.
KEVIN: Oh, someone throw a bucket of ink over him.
SOUTH AFRICAN: Ah! Good lord, I’m black. I’ll have to beat myself up and throw myself out of a window. (He does.)
Gumbootu thanks the Doctor for helping him reclaim his tribal fire engine, and the TURDIS departs.
KEVIN: And here I am back in the commentary position, which is similar to the missionary position except you don’t have anyone to talk to. So lean over and whisper sexily to yourself: Dr Poo-oo-ooh ah, ooh, ah, ooh, ah!
Phil’s memory is a bit vague on how far they got into the African Adventure storyline before the show was taken off the air – but it hadn’t reached the end. He remembers the episode with Cliff Baxter reading the news (Cliff was a real newsreader on JJJ) and he also remembers Gumbooto, but not the scaling of the mountain nor the restaurant. He does, however, remember a throwaway reference to Led Zeppelin records in a later episode – this could have been the one episode he heard later on when they broadcast the remaining ‘unheard’ episodes on Sunday afternoons.
